Russia blocked the Jehovah's Witnesses' website as "extremist" in 2015

On July 21, 2015, Russia's Ministry of Justice added jw.org — the official website of Jehovah's Witnesses, which carries the religion's literature in hundreds of languages — to the country's Federal List of Extremist Materials. Internet providers across Russia subsequently blocked the site, making Russia the only country to ban it.^[1]

The listing was the end of a two-year journey through the Russian courts. The Central District Court of Tver first declared jw.org "extremist" on August 7, 2013. The Tver Regional Court overturned that ruling on January 22, 2014. Then, on December 2, 2014, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reinstated the extremist designation, and the Witnesses' final appeal was rejected — clearing the way for the July 2015 listing and the nationwide block.^[1]

The Federal List of Extremist Materials is a Russian government register of texts, recordings, and websites that courts have declared extremist; distributing anything on it can carry criminal penalties. Adding the religion's central website to that list did more than inconvenience Russia's roughly 170,000 Witnesses — it placed the everyday act of sharing their literature online into legal jeopardy.^[1]

The organization framed the move as part of a broader campaign of pressure: the Supreme Court's decision, it said, "provides another means for some Russian officials to repress the peaceful religious activities of Jehovah's Witnesses."^[1] The listing fit a pattern that Russian authorities had been building for years — banning individual congregations and publications one by one, each ruling narrowing the space in which the religion could lawfully operate.

The blocking of the website proved to be a step toward something far larger. Less than two years later, in April 2017, Russia's Supreme Court would ban the Jehovah's Witnesses organization itself as extremist and order it liquidated nationwide.^[2]

Seen from that distance, the 2015 listing was less a single event than a milestone in a slow tightening. Within two years the Russian state moved from banning jw.org to banning the religion; within five, the European Court of Human Rights would declare the whole campaign unlawful — a judgment Russia, by then withdrawn from the court's jurisdiction, would simply ignore. For the country's Witnesses, the loss of their website was an early sign of how far the state was prepared to go.